He shaved daily on the retreat from Moscow
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal (1783–1842), kept his sang-froid and a morning shave during Napoleon's disastrous Russian winter retreat. Later, as The Red and the Black's great realist, he analyzed love's "crystallization" and wrote for "the Happy Few."
Born in Grenoble on 23 January 1783 to advocate Chérubin Beyle and Henriette Gagnon—who died in childbirth in 1790—he disliked his father and clung to sister Pauline. Napoleonic service made him: assistant war commissioner in Westphalia, auditor to the Conseil d'État from 3 August 1810, witness to Moscow's burning and the 1812 retreat. As Commissioner of War Supplies at Smolensk he found a usable Berezina ford instead of the crushed pontoon bridge, likely saving his party, and still shaved each day. After Fontainebleau (1814) he settled in Milan until Carbonari fears pushed him to Paris in 1821 "with 3,500 francs" and thoughts of suicide when the money ran out.
Consular posts at Trieste and Civitavecchia followed 1830—Metternich refused Trieste's exequatur over liberalism—and Italy remained his passion. The Charterhouse of Parma, drafted in fifty-two days, set sincerity against Restoration France; The Red and the Black (1830) became his Napoleon tribute and a mirror carried through the marketplace. De l'amour theorized crystallization in passionate love and was long ignored; psychologists later called him a first-rate mind before the label existed. Simone de Beauvoir praised his women as human beings, not ornaments. Syphilis contracted in December 1808 and toxic mercury-iodide treatments wrecked his body; he collapsed with a seizure in a Paris street and died 23 March 1842, buried at Montmartre.
Before "Stendhal"—from Winckelmann's birthplace Stendal, with an added H—he published as Bombet, Serpière, and more than a hundred other masks; Prosper Mérimée said he never signed a letter with his real name. Only The History of Painting (1817) bore Beyle. Contemporaries missed his realism; he dedicated work to Goldsmith's ironic "Happy Few." Racine and Shakespeare championed Romantic freedom over classic rules. The novelist who mirrored society knew selection, not total copy, makes art cognitive—and that a clear head on a frozen road can outrank a title.
Source: Stendhal
